The long awaited Technic sets (see below) have finally arrived on LEGO S@H

The guys over at TechnicBRICKs.blogspot also compared the prices of all these new sets for every country

I also noticed that Lego UK have lowered their prices for the snowmobile by £6 and the tractor by £12. looks like im going to be spending my birthday money after all!

Read more HERE

Here is a really cool Bobcat that i found on you tube, it uses Lego pneumatics to control the lift and tip of the bucket. This is a really good example of how one can combine pneumatics and the NXT together. I wish there were more information on it so that it would be easier to replicate, or make improvements.

As we all know, Lego turns 50 this year and to celebrate they’ve produced a bunch of “gold” bricks as a free gift with purchase of over $50.

The new set, “Town Plan” also includes three 2 by 2 golden bricks as well as a letter from company owner Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, who appeared on the original town plan box when he was much younger and returns on this one.

They’ve also produced a nice little anniversary site with a historical overview of their products.

You can read more about this on the Lego site

-Airkraft

I thought this is really cool. I do not know how many of you out there actually have an iPhone, but this would be really neat to have on one. It’s kind of like LDD from the looks of it. Here is a little information on the program:

“LEGO-touch for the iPhone will allow users to build virtual LEGO creations using a large catalog of basic building blocks.”

“Using the iPhone’s multi-touch display, you can easily grab blocks and assemble them into just about any shape you can imagine. A slick user interface lets you easily zoom in and rotate your designs, and easily apply any color in the spectrum to each of your blocks”

This is written for the purpose of persuading Lego to allow Mindsensors.com to use their sensor casings.

A small NXT (a Lego robotics kit) rover drives around with a sensor that detects which way an obstacle is. The shiny white robot dashed around quickly, and the whir of the motors rises and falls as the rover drives around autonomously. The robot turns away from several walls, then finds a cup and grabs it. The sensor is made by Mindsensors, an online store that makes some of the best sensors available. (A sensor gives input on something, in this case, it detects if the robot will hit something ahead of it or not.) However, all of their sensors are all un-Lego-like because they don’t have any protective encasing. They are just bare-bone circuit boards.

Mindsensors, in my opinion, has the best sensors among all other stores I have seen so far. They have a wide selection of sensors that has all the sensors that other stores offer, and more. Their prices are reasonable, ranging from $19.95 to $97.75 and their sensors are well-made. Hitechnic, another sensor company that Lego has joined with, sells a sensor for $46.99, yet Mindsensors sells one with the same exact capabilities for just $32!

Therefore, I think, Lego should do what they have already done several times these past years with other innovative companies: join with Read the rest of this entry »

I have been meaning to buy myself the crawler crane set (8288) for ages, but Lego discontinued them in the UK at Christmas 2007. However, after spending my £5 Lego voucher in my local Lego shop yesterday, I went to Toys R Us and to my great surprise, they had ONE left in stock. So I bought it.

And I must say, this is one of the best sets I have ever bought (apart from the NXT). It took me about 70 minutes to build, and it spent last night guarding my phone on my desk. Today I will build the second model that can be made from the set, and then tomorrow I will set about sorting out the pieces, so I can use them in my upcoming Mindstorms Models.

-Airkraft

I know that this is a very common topic, but I decided to post how I do it. There are many places that are out there that describe different ways how to go about this…

Read the rest of this entry »

The idea to make a crane to lift heavy objects came from Philo’s Webpage. His Crane Pimousse® uses an RCX but I only have an NXT so i decided to give it a try.I Used 50 pound test fishing line as the lift cable. It uses 8 pulleys to give it mechanical advantage to be able to lift an extremely heavy load.

It is designed to sit between two halves of a table and have the hook go up and down between them. At the time I built Heavy Lifter I did not have very many parts so I could not make it move as Philo’s does. If I were to build one today I would certainly make it movable. In my tests, It lifted about 40 Pounds about a foot in the air. It is rather slow because the lifting mechanism is geared down to be able to lift such a massive load.

It mostly uses parts from the Retail kit [8257] and the Crawler Crane [8288] and possibly maybe some other parts from other kits I’m not quite sure.

At this time I do not have any Videos, LDD file or Program, due to the lack of pictures and time to attempt to rebuild it. Sorry!!!

Please feel free to post any questions, comments, improvements or if you need help with Heavy Lifter at the Forum. Click Below:

Downloads:

No Downloads at this Time!!!

Video:

No Video at this Time!!!

Pictures:

This is a Dozer that I built to clean up all of my legos that get all over my floor. It also doubles as an excellent snowplow. You can use it to plow your driveway off from the comfort of your house. Dozer is compact and can plow anything you put in front of it. It can crawl right over a huge pile of legos with no problem. It uses the ps2 controller sensor mindsensors.com paired with a Pelican Nerf PS2 Controller to allow myself to control it with the precision that I need.

Please feel free to post any questions, comments, improvements or if you need help with Dozer at the Forum. Click Below:

Downloads:

Video:

Pictures: